Novi Tsvetya / Erotika i Porno

Novi Tsvetya (New Flowers) is a Bulgarian punk rock band. Formed in 1979, they are considered the first punk rock group to emerge from Bulgaria.

Growing up in Kyustendil, a town near the Serbian border, the lads benefited from the possibility of listening to punk rock on Yugoslav radio. Maybe that is why their sound was much closer to late 70s Yugo-punk bands such as Paraf and Pankrti than to anything British or American. Novi Cvetya’s songs are simple, snotty, and have a somewhat typically Balkanese tongue-in-cheek feel and sense of the absurd to them.

While Yugoslavia, an unaligned socialist country far more culturally liberal than Bulgaria, allowed homegrown punk talent to release records on the state-owned Yugoton label, there was no such option for Bulgaria’s Novi Cvetya. Even tape recorders were prohibitively expensive, but eventually the band managed to cut a demo tape, 10-15 copies of which went into circulation. These songs and all of the group’s further recordings resurfaced on a fantastic 2004 CD entitled Radiatsiya 1979-1995 in a limited edition of 1000, by now a collector’s item in its own right.